We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Happy Sunday. I advise you to go to church and pray for the sins you're planning during the sermon.
"What is your religion my son?" inquired the Archbishop of Rheims. "Pardon, monseigneur," replied Rochebriant; "I am ashamed of it." "Then why do you not become an atheist?" "Impossible! I should be ashamed of atheism." "In that case, monsieur, you should join the Protestants."
I thought that was his job description. Good luck with that show without him. He made a hit out of the equivalent of describing naked women to blind teenage boys. I'm sorry, was that offensive?
If you even hesitated to answer this question, there's something wrong with you. You shouldn't need to see the picture of a child with smallpox to answer it, either.
We used to shoot enemy combatants found out of uniform. Now we just round up the other army from time to time to ask them questions like The Usual Suspects. Turn to the right...
I think I can put my hand on my heart and say that I have no tyrannical leanings, though no doubt like everyone else there are a few things that I should like to see prohibited, such as (in my case) chewing gum, drinks sold in cans, baseball caps, rock and other forms of pop music in public places, and preferably in private as well, fast food, men wearing suits without ties, television, mobile telephones in trains and restaurants, burqas (except for drunken British girls on Friday and Saturday nights, for whom they should be compulsory), tattoos, piercings, celebrity magazines, pasteurised cheese, the use of the word chair for chairman, conversations in public about football, the Olympic Games, jeans, skateboards, eating in the streets, coffee served in plastic containers, basketball, etc.
He's the only author on the Internets I find essential. It was nice of him to write that list for me, to save me the trouble.
Well, we all hate Chicago Transit Authority, don't we? When did it become OK for wedding bands to get real, live, rock band careers? Who signed off on that? I know I wasn't consulted. Maybe it's not Chicago's fault. Maybe they thought they were just going to play the Bernstein wedding at another Mediterranean-themed stripmall function room; four hours, twenty minute breaks each hour; chicken and shells for dinner. Perhaps their agent bollixed it up and sent them to a recording studio instead. Back before GPS, it could happen. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Besides, Blood Sweat and Tears was much, much worse, and sooner.
I sort this sort of thing out the old-fashioned way: If suspicious, I punch them, hard, on the nose without warning. If they cry, they're usually innocent.
He was handed the greatest cash cow in the history of the world and tried to ride it in the derby. Should go on the Rushmore of incompetence,
despite the money he's made.
When Bird Dog told me he needed a rest, and was heading out to "take the waters," I pictured him going to one of those fancy hotels with lots of ceramic tile on the walls, within sight of the Danube, where all the women speak with a heavy Bavarian accent and they smear you with the local mud. Silly me. Let's get these links out of the way so I can go post Bird Dog's bail. Apparently, to him, "taking the waters" means shoplifting a couple of bottles of Poland Spring and some beef jerky in a convenience store on Staten Island.
Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: "Bro,1 you don't work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver."
They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it's certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you're an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to programming.
It's an enormous misappropriation of the word to call software designers "engineers." You're stressed because your stuff doesn't work, you're incompetent, and people notice it from time to time.
There you go. Read all that stuff. It won't make you any dumber, I promise. After I bail out Bird Dog, I'm going to ask him to chain me to an oar on the other side of Maggie's Farm's Trireme. My left bicep needs work.
Bird Dog needs therapy, so you're stuck with me. I imagine he's
currently trying to convince some girl to rub him the wrong way in order
to relax his tense muscles. He should just read the papers. Everything
in there will rub you the wrong way.
As the
employees examined some of the equipment, the owner stood by and said
nothing. He was remembering how difficult it had once been to afford
those machines, even the basic ones. What the employees regarded as
standard, he saw as an achievement.
Lots of things shock the Times -- except shocking things, generally. CEOs get a piece of the action, and talking about it like it's wages is stupid. Me? I just like saying "Marissa Mayer's remuneration" over and over.
I know, I know. If you're from New York City and you hear Iowa mentioned, you think it stands for Idiots Out Walking Around. But Maggie's Farmers know the value of a good Farmall driver, and farmers in Iowa can square dance with their tractors. Ain't that America?
Tractor Square Dancing Is Real, And It's Spectacular.
Fox News is a little behind the curve on this one:
A painting that features President Obama posed as Jesus Christ crucified on is on display at a community college art gallery in Boston. The painting by Michael D’Antuono is part of a larger exhibit called “Artists on the Stump – the Road to the White House 2012.” It’s on display at the Bunker Hill Community College Art Gallery until Dec. 15th. The painting is called “Truth” – and shows the president with his arms outstretched. A crown of thorns rests on his head.(link)
Of course, Maggie's Farm featured the original artwork back in 2009. It's much less offensive and blasphemous and trite than Fox suggests, and it's got a beat and you can dance to it. The seventies had much better music than the 2010s, and we can only dream of Carter-era levels of commerce at this point, but a bunch of sons of the desert dragging Americans out of our embassies really puts me in that nostalgic mood.How about you? Just like old times.
I wonder if Ted Koppel will show up on TV late tonight?
It's been sort of amusing watching people from the right side of the blogosphere weigh in for over a year with political advice for Willard Romney. They'd take a flurry on the pizza guy. Look over there, they'd say! If only Romney was a fat, loudmouthed ex-congressman, smug for no reason, then he'd get somewhere. Yelling RON PAUL! would solve everything. Why doesn't he foam at the mouth like the porcine blowhard from New Jersey? Romney just smiled and kept going. Let's face it: Romney is the Amiable Terminator. He won't stop until he's shaken the hand of every Sarah Connor in the phonebook, and asked each in turn if she needs some canned food to tide her over until payday. Then he goes back to the phonebook and starts in on all the Sarah Connellys.
Romney is a rare thing in American public life. He is what he is. You can see how pleasant, but stiff, he is in that video. He cannot be what he is not, even while his position requires that he mix with people who are not like him. Some might call that good manners. People who have no manners don't recognize good manners in others. They call it standoffishness, or aloofness, or call you a robot for being polite. Many see decency as a kind of accusation. There's no other way to evaluate the Republican response to Romney. They don't know what to make of a decent, earnest person. They were hoping for devious so they could win. The other side does that constantly, why shouldn't we? Romney's not interested. He owes you nothing if he loses. You owe him a lot for him even taking up the cudgels on your behalf. He's successful and happy and politics is bucket of guts to step in for a person like him.
Blog writers are just blog commenters that go first, and they all know what Romney should be doing. They envision the perfect candidate -them. I might point out to these kings of that rock there to this clod of earth under their shoes, that Romney got himself elected Governor of Massachusetts. You're giving political advice to a Mormon Republican who figured out how to be elected governor of Massachusetts.
Romney's detractors on the left aren't worth talking about. Romney and his family could be defamed --and Lord, weren't they -- but there's close to nothing in his personal or public life that isn't above reproach. People are imperfect creatures of course, but every once in a great while you meet people who seem incapable of deliberate misbehavior. The human foibles we are all subject to can be teased into imprecations of malice, but any reasonable person can see there's no there, there in the Oakland of Romney's misdeeds. He's a nice person, a capable and commendable businessman, a competent and genial public administrator, he's married to a nice person, they raised a large crop of nice people together, and so forth.
I come not to praise Romney, nor to bury him in predictions and advice. I'd just like to express my thanks to him, here, where he surely will not see it, for allowing me, once in my life, to vote for an entirely decent, honorable, and capable person to be the chief magistrate of the United States. That has never happened to me before. To me, he cannot lose. America might. It won't be his fault.
It's just gravy that a vote for him is a vote against his opponent, who is, and always has been a malicious, callow, greedy, grasping, low-rent A-hole. I won't even mention it.
Hey, if you've been hoarding Krugerrands since Nancy Pelosi hove into view, have I got good news for you! Marketwatch says gold's at $17,727 an ounce right now. Think of all the ammo and beans you can buy with a pound or two of your wife's melted jewelry today.
Into each life some rain must fall, though. I wonder what a gallon of gas is going to cost tomorrow now that a barrel of oil is worth $9228. I'd fill up today before they change the signs, if I were you. Marketwatch. For the Lulz.
When we were kids, we played Army Man. In the evenings, we watched Vic Morrow keep his head in Combat, and Christopher George go dunebuggying in Rat Patrol. Entertainment like that was everywhere, and every retaining wall in every driveway had imaginary Guns of Navarone atop it the day after we saw the movie. We'd gather up all our military-ish toy swag, pick sides, and wander the neighborhood sneaking up on each other and arguing over who shot whom. Nothing we had shot any sort of projectile, so there was nothing to do but argue; but we all wanted to die and fall to the ground in histrionic ways and writhe around a bit, so the arguments were mostly about who was "throwing" the war too easily to suit the other side. There was a dirty little secret of all such suburban war games of the sixties. We all wanted to be the Germans.
The Germans were cool. Exotic. The Americans were just our dads in olive drab. German uniforms were like a circus outfit compared to a reform school tie. Germans had those nifty beer bottle hand grenades, tanks named after panthers and tigers instead of anonymous generals, and those awesome grease guns that went BBBRRRRRPPPP when you let them off the chain. And besides, if you were the Germans, you were expected to lose and die and writhe on the ground in your death throes over and over and have all the fun.
The actual American military seems to have understood that the Germans had all the sexy stuff, and worked hard to remind the American troops that outre weapons, gaudy uniforms with lots of lightning bolts and skulls, and Roman salutes don't win wars. The American army was boring compared to the German army. Boring like Joe Louis fighting Joel Grey would be, that is. Workmanlike. Here's an interesting example of the mundane but necessary propaganda that reminded American GIs that the boring stuff works just fine.
